


courting miss sætre

by followsrabbit



Category: SKAM (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Regency, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-10 05:21:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11684937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/followsrabbit/pseuds/followsrabbit
Summary: Miss Noora Sætre has ambitions of spinsterhood; Mr. William Magnusson has other ideas.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (The wildly anachronistic regency era au that literally no one asked for)

It was a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman of marriageable age must be in want of a husband.

Miss Noora Amalie Sætre simply happened to think it the _dumbest_ truth she’d ever heard—no matter what all the eligible bachelors, matchmaking mamas, smirking rakes, and coy heiresses in her acquaintance believed.

"You really don’t want to marry?”

Sitting on Eva’s bed, already dressed for the evening’s ball, Noora shook her head at her closest friend. “No.”

Eva looked into the mirror for one for more moment, tugged at the jonquil skirt of her dress, and then turned around to join Noora on the mattress. “Not ever?”

The pins holding her blonde hair in place atop her head felt heavy when Noora shook her head for a second time. “Eva, you know I’m happy you found a love match. My feelings about marriage have nothing to do with you and Mr. Vasquez.”

(Her feelings about marriage were not worth discussing at length at all right now—they’d already talked through most of them, and Noora would rather not divulge the rest.)

Curling up beside her on the bed, Eva surrendered her dress to whatever wrinkles might come. “I’m not talking about Jonas and me,” she protested. “You’re having a Season in London, we go to every ball, and you have no interest in finding a husband?” Skepticism dried her voice and narrowed her eyes.

Resolve resonated from Noora’s. “No interest.”

Eva shook her head. “Don’t tell my parents. They think you came to London with us for all the titled bachelors.”

Noora let her eyes tilt towards the ceiling. “ _Titled bachelors_.” It wasn’t that men of good title and fortune were _all_ horrible—they just tended to take for granted their power and freedom and general ability to entrance every unmarried woman they met. “Don’t worry, your parents will think I’m on the marriage mart with every other single girl.”

(Marriage mart, meat market, same principle.)

Husband hunting had _,_ admittedly, inspired her invitation to stay in the Mohns’ London townhouse for the Season. Ostensibly. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Mohn would ever admit that they’d mostly brought her to town with them so that Eva wouldn’t feel quite so lonely when they disappeared on their myriad social engagements—the number of which, Mrs. Mohn at least seemed to genuinely regret.

That was more than Noora could say for either of her parents.

Although boarding schools had fallen out of fashion in favor of private governesses, Noora and Eva owed their friendship to the fact that their families had both felt it easier to send their daughters away to one such for their education. An unconventional choice, but the best one Noora’s parents had ever made for her. All her dearest relationships had come from that school—her friendship with Vilde Lien, with Christina Berg, with Sana Backkoush.

Noora wished they could all be here now. But Christina and Sana hadn’t bothered coming to London to find matches, and the Liens had recently departed town to meet the Scottish family of Vilde’s fiancée. (A love match. Somehow. Sana was in love with her fiancée too. Noora didn’t know how so many of her friends could possibly have received offers out of love, but did know better—far better—than to expect the same for herself.)

“So you’ll dance every song tonight?” Eva teased. “And flirt with every lord?”

Noora arched an eyebrow at her. “Will you?”

A shrug creased Eva’s yellow muslin. “Of course. Have to keep Jonas on his toes.”

Her smile softened the next roll of her eyes. “Of course.”

* * *

There were, as it turned out, plenty of men happy to fill Noora’s dance card.

A blessing and a curse. (Mostly a curse.) Despite what she’d told Eva earlier, Noora did not truly care what people made of her disinterest in men and matrimony. As long as Eva’s parents didn’t send her away for it, she had no problem sitting on the sidelines with the Season’s wallflowers. Ridiculous that girls were made to feel ashamed for empty dance cards, when they couldn’t ask anyone to dance. As if a woman’s only worth lay in her appeal to the men around her.

 _So_ incredibly dumb.

But the night wandered by more quickly when she accepted a few dances, and she liked some of the men who asked—Mr. Vasquez always did, naturally, when he came. So did his near constant companions, Mr. Valtersen and Mr. Disi and Mr. Næsheim. Mr. Fossbakken would have too, if he were here, rather than off in Scotland, introducing Vilde to his family and estate.

Noora didn’t _hate_ ton parties—but she preferred when they passed swiftly.

This one immediately sped beyond the average when Eva hurried over to her from the refreshments table, both eyebrows raised. “I think,” she said from behind her gloved hand “that I was just propositioned.”

Noora’s eyebrows rose too. “Propositioned _?_ ”

“Beside the refreshments table.”

As if that were the relevant detail. “By _whom_?” Even as she asked, the sinking feeling in Noora’s gut knew perfectly well who would have had the nerve.

So, when Eva answered, “Mr. Schistad,” it came as absolutely no surprise.

Eva had met Mr. Christoffer Schistad at the beginning of the Season, and had been trading dances and banter and smirks with him ever since. Mr. Schistad did, granted, trade dances and banter and smirks with a good many ladies—but Eva seemed to have become his favorite. Which was troubling. A good many ladies had been ruined by Mr. Schistad too.

 _Rake, cad, buck_ —none of those words seemed strong enough for this particular rogue.

Noora ran her gloved fingertips along her forehead and took a deep breath as Eva went on. “He just asked me if I wanted to take a stroll in the garden and get lost in the bushes with him, right in front of the lemonade.” She still sounded more amused than offended. Which was also troubling. _In front of the lemonade_ meant _in front of whatever gossips might have felt thirsty._

Since she was still rubbing her forehead, she could feel the incredulity stretching it. “ _Who_ does he think he is?”

After a sip of lemonade and a shrug, Eva replied, “One of the most eligible bachelors in London, probably. And a close friend of our host’s heir.”

When Noora let her hand fall from her temple, it was only to cross her arms. Eva wasn’t wrong. For as little reason as they had to pay attention to marriage mart gossip, between Eva’s long-standing understanding with Jonas Vasquez and Noora’s commitment to spinsterhood, they did know who the two catches of the Season were.

Mr. William Magnusson and Mr. Christoffer Schistad. Both unrepentant rakes, both flagrantly wealthy, and both utterly disinterested in taking a wife. One would think that last fact would diminish their appeal, but somehow it only seemed to polish it. Every single girl and her mother wanted the victory of converting them to marriage.

(As if they wouldn’t keep hoards of mistresses even after family obligation did finally compel them to wed. Ridiculous.)

Contrary to popular, romantic opinion, Noora did not think that former rakes ever made good husbands. Mr. Christoffer Schistad certainly wouldn’t.

“What did you say?”

“What did I say?” Eva asked, mocked, laughed. “What do you think I said? I’m betrothed!”

Carefully, Noora looked over to the refreshments table. There was Mr. Schistad, standing with Mr. Magnusson now—and blatantly staring at Eva, consuming her every strawberry highlight and inch of bare skin with his gaze.

“Relax, Noora,” Eva said, pulsing her palm around her arm. “It’s only a game.”

She pressed her lips together rather than reply. _Only a game_ was exactly what scared her.

* * *

The night unraveled around her, as if from a distance. From beyond a glass wall. Noora could see every man she danced with, every glass of water she drank, every dessert she ate—but her thoughts didn’t touch them.

 _Only a game_ , Eva’s voice rang again and again and again through her head, a particularly repetitive bell.

A woman’s ruin was not a game. A horrible injustice, yes. A gross double standard, obviously. But a game— _games_ implied resets and relaxation, and ruin offered either. Not for the girl involved. For girls, it meant frowning fathers, sobbing mothers, the repeated affirmation that she was no longer worth _anything_. That she was a secret to be covered up and sent away and forgotten.

Men could treat it as a game. The popularity of Christoffer Schistad and William Magnusson proved that. While Noora didn’t know them well, she did know that they treated girls like a sport. Mr. Schistad especially.

So she did not think that she was out of line for slipping away to the opposite side of the room as soon as Mr. Vasquez had Eva distracted, and throwing herself straight into William Magnusson’s path.

( _Throwing_ might be a strong word. She simply stepped in front of him and then refused to leave.)

“Mr. Magnusson,” she said, slowly enough to feign calmness. “May I have a word?”

He blinked at her like she was being terribly rude, terribly forward. She was. While they had been introduced once, during the height of Vilde’s obsession with winning him before Mr. Fossbakken won her, they were neither acquaintances nor friends nor equals. She had no title and no true connections beyond the Mohns, who hung several rungs beneath him on the ton’s social ladder. She had no reason to approach him, let alone address him.

His dark bangs fell into his eyes as he tilted his head at her. As he stared at her. Stared and stared and stared and then—the corners of his lips twitched. “Wouldn’t you rather have a dance?”

He said it so easily, so smoothly, like he expected her enthusiastic agreement to come with just as scarce effort. ( _Rake, cad, buck_ —they didn't seem strong enough words for him either.)

Noora thanked providence that she seemed to have caught him in a rare moment of relative privacy. For all the muslin dresses and crisp cravats milling about, none stood close enough to hear her just now. “No.”

Either amusement or bemusement—maybe both—wrote over his stare.

Noora crossed her arms to match the knots in her stomach. “I don’t care to dance with you,” she clarified. “I’d like your friend to stop harassing mine.”

For all his flaws—which Noora felt more than ready to number—Mr. Magnusson did not pretend at ignorance. “You’re Miss Mohn’s friend,” he guessed.

A harsh breath slid back down her throat. It did not bode well that Eva had become a topic of conversation between Mr. Schistad and Mr. Magnusson. She could just picture them talking about her, about all their conquests, gloating over them like they were badges rather than humans. Her heart hammered in her ears. “What charming men you are. Chasing after betrothed girls for the fun of the chase? For the challenge? Never mind what happens to their reputations.”

This time, Mr. Magnusson didn’t blink. “Who are you?”

“Are you all so insecure,” Noora carried on, heat creeping from her chest to her neck to her head, even as her voice turned several degrees colder, “that you have to play with the reputations of promised girls to feel powerful? Because your mothers never played with you? Because your fathers prefer their mistresses to their families?”

 _Staring_ no longer seemed the right word for the way he was looking at her. _Studying_ seemed more apt. _Silent_ , too.

“Stop walking around like such a cliche.”

By the time he opened his mouth, she had already walked away, her rose dress wavering at her ankles, her shoulders thrown back, her chin high, and her reason screaming.

* * *

When Noora returned to Eva and Mr. Vasquez, she pretended that nothing had happened. That she had not just verbally assaulted their host’s son. That she hadn’t just sneered, _Stop walking around like such a cliche_ , at one of the ton’s most eligible bachelors.

Her pride beamed. Her common sense shriveled.

As if Mr. Magnusson would care a whit what she had to say about his friend’s romantic pursuits. As if she’d just accomplished anything, other than a great deal of awkwardness.

(Every ounce of her pride kept beaming.) 

* * *

As for the way William Magnusson’s eyes kept finding her for the rest of the night—Noora didn’t have to pretend anything, because she never noticed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (So much love to Julia Quinn's amazing novel The Viscount Who Loved Me for inspiring the line, "Contrary to popular, romantic opinion, Noora did not think that former rakes ever made good husbands.")


	2. Chapter 2

When the Mohns’ butler informed Noora that she had a caller the next afternoon, she had ink stains muddling her fingertips, no time to clean them, and no clue who could possibly wish to see her.

Noora sorted the corners of her papers into line with one other, then into one of her dresser drawers, before hurrying onto her feet to open the door and ask, “Did they gave a name?”

Still standing in the hall, holding his square chin high, Campbell nodded. “Mr. William Magnusson.”

The butler’s eyes narrowed at whatever expression swept over Noora’s face. She didn’t have a looking glass in her hand, but she could imagine the horror contorting her eyebrows and lips and gaze. “Can you,” she started, stopped, started again, “can you tell him that I’m not in?” Eva had left an hour earlier to spend the afternoon with Mr. Vasquez and his sister, after all—Noora very well might have gone with her if not for her writing.

Campbell nodded again, warier this time. “Of course, Miss Sætre.”

He turned. Noora hesitated. “Wait.”

After the way she had spoken to Mr. Magnusson the previous day… The demands she had made…

She might not wish to see him, but she could hardly turn him away, not if he’d come to say something more about Eva and Mr. Schistad. Something more than she’d given him time to reply yesterday, before attacking his morals and parents and class. (It had not, looking back, been very much time at all.)

The back of her neck ached. Perhaps he’d come to inform her that he planned to blacken her name among the ton in revenge for her impertinence.

“I’ll go.”

* * *

William Magnusson had not yet seated himself when Noora finally entered the parlor. Anyone else might have looked listless standing there, waiting. He did not. Face impenetrable, fashion pristine, and eyes assessing every inch of the room, he hardly looked like he was waiting at all.

Then he heard her slippers, turned, and began assessing her instead.

“Mr. Magnusson,” she said, her voice as short as her greeting. Noora remained standing.  _Sitting_  implied  _lingering,_ and she had no intention of giving any such invitation.

The corners of his lips stretched. “Miss Noora Amalie Sætre.” He made her name sound like a medal he’d earned. As though the fact that he’d found it should impress her. “No chaperone?”

“Do I need one?” she said. It was perhaps the dumbest question she’d ever asked.  _All_ unmarried girls required chaperones—never more so than in the company of a known rake.

But she couldn’t let any of the Mohns’ maids hear this conversation.

He shrugged his lips and shoulders at her; an inarticulate code for  _yes, probably_. “It’s your choice.” The words untied a few of the knots in her stomach, though the idea that she had any agency at all compared to Mr. Magnusson should have sounded like a bag of moonshine.

She crossed her arms.

If he noted her hostility, he did not acknowledge it; only kept gazing at her like that, smirking at her like that, and said, “Shall we take a stroll in the park?”

 _Now_ Noora stared back at him. “No.” It wasn’t a question, but disbelief made it sound like one.

“In my carriage then?”

“No.” More certainty this time. A decisive jerk of her head.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Don’t you want to hear what I have to say about your friend?”

She didn’t particularly  _want_ to hear anything from him, but—“You can’t say it here?”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“Fun?” she repeated, voice tight as her stays. “Eva’s reputation is not a game.”

He held up both hands in surrender as he sat. “I never called Miss Mohn a game.” Then he closed his mouth, gestured to the chair closest to his with a flicker of his dark eyes, and waited.

As much as Noora would have liked to disappoint him, she forced herself to sit down. For Eva’s sake. (For the sake of her own pride and sanity, she chose the farthest chair.) Given the way his hair had fallen into his eyes, Noora could not tell for sure, but she was fairly certain he rolled his eyes.

“Mr. Schistad thinks she is,” she said.

Already leaning back against the upholstery, perfectly comfortable, as at home there as he likely would have been in his own townhouse—“Chris thinks she’s a pretty girl. Chris likes pretty girls.”

“You mean that Mr. Schistad likes ruining pretty girls.”

“Who has he ruined?”

Noora opened her mouth to answer—and then paused. She groped through the recesses of her mind for a single name. “He has a reputation for it,” she said instead, finally.

William held her gaze, his mouth straighter now. “Chris knows better than to get caught. And any girl he did compromise, I could arrange a match for.”

Because  _that_ sounded like a happy start to a marriage. “Eva already has a match,” Noora said, refusing to surrender the armor on her voice.

“Good. So we can stop worrying about our friends.”

“No,” she said. “That isn’t  _good_. Betrothals get called off all the time by suspicious fiancées.”

“Should he be suspicious?”

Noora curled one hand, then remembered the ink—when she looked down, her palm was spotted with it. “Eva has no interest in Mr. Schistad.”

“Then I’m sure she and her fiancée will be fine.”

Now that her palm lines were so thoroughly darkened, Noora let her hand clench into as much of a fist as it liked at her side. “So you don’t mean to say anything to Mr. Schistad?”

William exhaled a dry, muted laugh. “I didn’t say that.”

A tighter fist. “If this is a joke to you, there’s no reason for you to stay.”

“Isn’t there?” he said. His stare felt like a tangible, physical weight on her shoulders. “Even if I did think it a joke? Which,” he added, “I don’t.”

“We have nothing to talk about, other than our friends.”

“What about everything you said to me last night? Was that all about our friends?”

“Yes.” Noora flushed, even though she’d  _known_ her diatribe couldn’t pass unmentioned. “I was angry on Eva’s behalf.”

William rubbed the side of one finger across his lips, obscuring whatever curve might have claimed it. “At me?”

“No.”  _Yes._ “At men like you.”

“The cliché kind,” he clarified.

Noora felt her own lips spreading in spite of themselves. “At least you can admit it.”

William laughed again, that same low, under-the-breath sound. (Noora began to wonder what a genuine laugh would sound like from him, then stopped herself.) “Miss Mohn has a fiancée,” he said finally, after a few more beats of amused silence. “Do you?”

“No.” And then because his eyes glinted with satisfaction at that, no doubt assuming that she was a shrew and therefore incapable of catching a husband, she blurted, “And I never plan to.” In the space of a second, Noora had to swallow her own wince.  _Why_? Less than twenty-four hours ago, Noora had assured Eva that she wouldn’t advertise her ambitions of spinsterhood, and here she was stating them outright to London’s premier bachelor.

“You never plan to have a fiancée,” he said, his entire expression flat. She couldn’t blame him for his doubt; life didn’t often treat unmarried women kindly.  _Old maid_ ,  _ape leader_ —the nicknames for spinsters left a bad taste on the tongue.

A lock of hair had slipped free from her bun a moment before; Noora pushed the blonde behind her ears now. “That’s right.”

He pushed at his hair too, although his bangs weren’t anywhere near his eyes. “Do your parents expect you to remain single to care for them?”

“It has nothing to with my parents.” (Noora said that last word like a curse in spite of herself.) “Have you ever heard a bride’s vows? Her promises of obedience? She gives away her rights and money and property, and the groom gives nothing.”

She didn’t know when he’d leaned forward, abandoning his slacken recline. “He offers protection and security. He gives her his name.”

“She loses her name.” Noora took a deep breath—she  _needed_ to stop talking. Debating gender equality with the likes of William Magnusson would not lead anywhere fruitful. “This does not have anything to do with our friends.”

“Can we only speak about them?”

Another breath, deeper and slower. “We have nothing else to speak about.”

William canted his head at her. “Come for that stroll with me,” he reworded his earlier offer. “We’ll find something.”

But Noora stood, crossed her arms, and steeled her shoulders. “The Mohns will be returning soon. You should leave.”

When William rose, he offered his arm and a raised eyebrow to her.

“Alone.”

Another almost smile, another almost laugh. His dropped arm should have signaled a surrender, but he had a gentleman’s way of making it look perfectly natural.  _Gentleman._ Noora rolled her eyes.

“Next time, Miss Noora Amalie Sætre.”

( _How_ had he discovered her middle name?)

Noora kept her feet planted on the patterned carpet as he escorted himself out. “I wouldn’t wait for it, Mr. Magnusson,” she called after him.

(She did not notice the way her ink-stained fingertips snared his gaze.)

* * *

Mid-afternoon sunlight shone into Noora’s chamber but didn’t make anything look any brighter. The light barely registered at all. The stark awareness of how little she had accomplished with her two (entirely too forward) conversations with William Magnusson far overshadowed it.

No true promises to talk to Mr. Schistad and no true acknowledgment of Eva’s danger; only his assurances that the matter shouldn’t worry her. Which meant very little. Less than little. Less than nothing.

All that she had won between last night and this afternoon was Mr. Magnusson’s attention, and that felt more like a punishment than a prize.

Pressing her lips together, Noora closed her eyes for a beat, and then pulled her papers out from her dresser. The stack of them poked through the drawer’s crack, propping it open, no matter how hard she tried to push it closed.

Though Noora had no interest in crediting the ‘snooping, spying maid’ stereotype so prevalent in gossip and other tawdry fiction—Penelope seemed lovely—she would still have to find a better hiding place for her novel soon, now that it had grown thick enough to announce itself. No one, let alone an unattached girl, had any innocent reason to have so many papers hidden away.

Her second novel. Just as secret as the first, if unfinished and unpublished as of yet.

Pushing William Magnusson out of her mind’s eye like so many strands of greasy hair, Noora folded herself into her chair and began writing again.

* * *

When Eva returned later that afternoon, she came straight to Noora’s room, saw her friend bent over her papers with a quill in hand, and flopped down upon her bed.

“It’s so stuffy in here,” she said through a yawn. Eva tugged her hair from its bonnet and bun, ever eager to let it free fall down her back once again. “Noora. Have you stepped outside this room at all today?”

Still writing, still narrow-eyed, still only half-present, Noora nodded.

“Really?”

Noora’s hand paused on the paper. “No,” she admitted, lied. “Not yet.”

Eva turned her head until one of her sun-pink cheeks lay flat on the mattress. “Too busy penning your next bestseller?”

When life offered one the chance to avoid delving into her attempts to meddle into her best friend’s love life by enlisting the help of London’s richest bachelor, one took it. So Noora leapt on the chance to reply: “Yes. Let me write.”

“Careful,” Eva teased. “You’re keeping London’s biggest secret, and I know it. Me. I could ruin you.”

“But then who would keep you company after I fled to the Continent?”

“Good point. Better not.”

Noora had just set her papers down and started to roll the tension from her shoulders, when Eva propped herself onto her elbows to continue, “Speaking of scandals…” an envelope peeked out between her fingers. “My fiancée keeps sending you mail. Through me. The nerve of you two.”

Noora sat down next to Eva on the bed’s edge and stole the envelope from her grasp. “We’re shameless,” she agreed. Neither needed to open the parcel to know that it contained the latest pay from her publisher. Her latest fix of money, independence, possibilities.

(Marriage would strip it all from her.)


	3. Chapter 3

Norman Ames’s first novel had entranced London from its first sentence to its last period. The thick volume sat in every bookstore, every household, and on most every bedside table for months. It dominated drawing room conversation and literary debates. It shocked and offended and awed and addicted and, most of all, intrigued.

Everyone knew that Norman Ames was a pseudonym. Everyone believed they knew why too. _Cecilia_ was, by every measure, a scandal clad in print; a chronicle of every topic scorned by polite conversation and feasted upon by closed-door-gossip. Ames had woven a common enough story, the ruin of an innocent girl—yet in a way that  _sympathized_  with her even in her worst moments.

Unheard of. Enthralling. Even readers who went red in the face over the book’s politics and societal censure could not put it down from cover page to back cover. Those readers might have keeled over altogether had they discovered that the most shocking, most popular novel of the year had been written by a young, single woman.

(No one could ever discover that. No one would ever believe that a young, single woman could write such a convincing picture of sexual awakening and social ruin without having experienced it for herself.)

It pained Noora, on a visceral level, to write under a man’s name—but she needed the book to sell as well as literarily possible, and she wished to remain relatively unknown. The fact that Mr. Vasquez had lent his publishing connections to her, that Eva had convinced him to act as a go-between, came as nothing short of a miracle.

And Noora was not in the habit of taking miracles for granted—certainly not the money she had made through her writing. The ability to support herself without her parents, without a husband, had always sounded like a pretty, Christmas Eve dream. The kind that crept behind a child’s eyes before she hurried down the stairs the next day, only to discover a pile of impersonal presents.

No matter how many book payments she opened, Noora would never lose the thrill of unwrapping something she truly wanted.

A candle burned in the corner as Noora kept scribbling and scribbling, late into the night. She could not know that her second novel would do quite as well… only that it would stir just as much controversy. Especially in London. Her first book had picked at the mores of country life; this one would illuminate the realities of the Season for its debutantes.

The last several weeks had provided plenty of fodder. The last day had provided even more.

(Noora wondered if a character named  _William_ would fool anyone.)

* * *

Over the next week, Noora suffered several more invitations to dance from William Magnusson. The usual interaction went something like so:

_“Shall we dance a waltz?”_

_“I’ve hurt my foot.”_

_A glance at her dance card. “You’re dancing the sets before and after.”_

_A shrug._

She received several more calls from him too. Noora refused them all. His cards sat beside her manuscript, tucked away out of sight—along with the messages he left scrawled on them.

Words no one else should see.

 _You were the prettiest girl in the room last night_ and  _What do I have to do to convince you to dance with me?_ and  _Bloody hell, you’re so beautiful._

As for the most hidden, the most secret, the most worrisome of them all:  _You had ink on your hands the other day. No shock that you’re a bluestocking._

Comments about her beauty—Noora had grown used to those, vain as she felt admitting it.  _Maybe_ her heart sped, on occasion, at the proof that William Magnusson thought her so pretty, but reality always slowed it soon enough. He thought she was pretty because she kept evading him. Because she was a novelty who did not care about marrying him.

Observations about her ink-stained hand—she could not trust him with those.

Noora had to remember that he thought her a pretty, diverting game. Nothing more.

(The novel was almost finished. She would not rewrite hundreds of pages to weave in a character named William. She would not.)

* * *

(She didn’t. She named him Willhelm.)

* * *

Though Mr. Magnusson kept creeping into Noora’s writing and head and sights, she could not forget that Mr. Schistad deserved her fuller attention. William had not actually done anything to her, other than heat her blood like a raging teakettle.

Christoffer Schistad, however, persisted in doing plenty—namely, flirting with Eva at every possible opening. Noora did not know what to make of the fact that Eva persisted in letting him, in smiling at him like she wanted him to carry on.

So, when Noora sought William Magnusson out again, she only did so for Eva’s sake.

“Miss Noora Amalie Sætre,” he said through a smile when he saw her. “Have you changed your mind about our dance?”

Noora crossed her arms. Her full name seemed to have become a loophole for him, a way of uttering her Christian name without propriety’s—or her—permission.

(Arrogant cad.)

“Have you changed your mind about speaking to Mr. Schistad?”

William’s eyes rolled up towards the ceiling before sliding back down to meet hers. “He’s my friend, not my servant. I appreciate your confidence in my authority, but it doesn’t extend to him.” A beat. “Or to you, apparently.”

“So you’re not going to do anything,” Noora summarized.

Ballroom chatter buzzed behind and around them. Footsteps too. So many reminders that they had a swarm of people surrounding them—and yet Noora could only register William’s voice, kept low so as to elude any ears save their own. “I didn’t say that.”

“So you will do something?”

“I didn’t say that either.”

Noora was half-tempted to drop her arms, just for the satisfaction of crossing them again. “What do you want?” she asked, forced herself to ask, finally.

He stared at her.

There was blushing, there was ‘flying one’s colors,’ and then there was the pink heating her cheeks at present.

“If I speak to Chris again,” he said, “we will take that stroll through Hyde Park together.”

Noora bit her lip.

“And,” he added, “you will stop ‘hurting your foot’ every time I ask you to dance.”

He sounded so exasperated there that Noora had to bite down on her lip even harder, just to stab her smile away. “Perhaps I’m injury prone.”

“The first dance of the night.” His mouth curved too. “Do we have a deal, Miss Sætre?”

Noora let her lower lip, pinched thoroughly colorless now, slip free from her teeth. She glanced over to the other side of the room—and saw Christoffer Schistad standing considerably too close to Eva as he smirked something too close to her ear. As she laughed back.

She shifted her glance slightly. As Jonas Vasquez stood by the room’s threshold, squinting at them.

“Yes,” she said, sighed. “We have a deal.”

(She no longer had to wonder what William Magnusson’s grin looked like.)

* * *

Hyde Park offered a good deal of loveliness in early summer. So much green beneath them in the grass, blue above them in the sky, blue beyond them in the water. Cheery flowers and leafy trees swaying around them in the soft breeze.

Noora had crossed her arms the minute she’d first begun to enjoy the weather, and hadn’t uncrossed them yet. Of course Mr. Magnusson would choose a pleasant day for their stroll—a day when half the ton would be out strolling too, taking note of the title-less, connection-less, wealth-less girl with whom he had chosen to spend his afternoon.

At least he had brought one of his more matronly maids to chaperone, albeit from a few steps behind them.

“My grandmother used to take me here,” William said, interrupting the nature-chirped quiet that had settled between them, “when I was younger.” He pointed to the wavering shallows of the Serpentine River. “She told me that the river had sea monsters lurking beneath the surface so that I’d stop trying to swim in it.” A beat, a crook of his lips. “I was terrified.”

Noora said nothing, gave him nothing. She hadn’t promised him her conversation, only her presence.

“I think she felt guilty eventually,” he went on, “because she told me later that there were beautiful things too. Mermaids, naiads—water nymphs.”

“I know what naiads are,” she interrupted, then pressed her lips together. As though it mattered whether or not he thought her intelligent.

His lips crooked even more curved. “Of course.”

 _As though he knew anything about her_. “Do you think this will charm me?”

He blinked. “This?”

“This,” she repeated, waving a hand through the air. “Your childhood story about your grandmother, the sunny day in the park. Do you think we’re in a Jane Austen novel?”

“Jane Austen writes romances,” he said. “Do you think we are?”

Noora considered looking up at the sun, just to blind herself to his blatant amusement, but settled for tilting her eyes to the top of an unusually tall tree instead. “No.” A pause. “And her books aren’t  _only_ romances. She writes social critiques.”

“Like you do.”

Her breath, her composure, her feet—they all stumbled at once. Noora might have fallen right onto the utterly flat, utterly groomed ground, had William not darted a hand out to steady her. His arms anchored her waist for a slip of a second; long enough for her to feel how unexpectedly strong, unexpectedly hard they were, even through the sleeves of his tailcoat.

“I’m assuming,” he amended. He dropped his arms and palms from her muslin.

(The solid warmth of both still haunted her abdomen.)

“Why?” she did her best to reestablish her footing and her voice. “Because I happened to have ink stained hands one afternoon?”

William pointed down to the grass-stained hem of her dress with his eyes.

Noora bit back a sigh.  _Fine_. So perhaps she had not reacted with the utmost subtlety. “There was a branch. And I was writing a letter to a friend before you called. One of the women you’ve used.”

When he squinted at her, she knew it had nothing to do with the beaming sun.

“Miss Vilde Lien? You made her think you were going to offer for her.”

He ducked beneath a crooked tree branch. “How did I do that?”

"You—you danced with her. And flirted with her. You made her think that you liked her.”

Daylight seemed to glint from William’s eyes when he caught hers. “Is it my fault if a person can’t tell the difference between politeness and interest?”

She couldn’t understand how he’d made it so challenging to look away from him, to retort, to believe her own words when she spoke next. “You could have been polite without leading her on.” But Noora had spent the beginning of the Season bemoaning the fact that Vilde could not read Mr. Magnusson’s obvious lack of intentions towards her. He had a point.

“Miss Lien seems fine now.”

He had a point there too. Noora kept silent rather than admit so aloud.

“Is that all you write?” William asked, once it became clear that Noora did not mean to say anything more. “Letters to Miss Lien?” At some point, they had ambled over to the shore of the river. At another point, they seemed to have stopped there.

Noora wished a hard breeze would push him in. “Why do you care?”

A family of ducks waddled and quacked behind him, oblivious to the tension ironing the air above them. “How else will we get to know each other?”

“You don’t care about getting to know me.” He wanted her admiration, because he could not conceive of a woman’s indifference to him. That was all.

But he did not so much as pause before replying, “Yes, I do.” He did not smirk either. His face did not move at all, but remained as still as the rest of his body, exhaling an emotion that Noora refused to call earnestness.

She swallowed. “Tell me something about yourself then,” she said, then told herself she’d only opened her mouth to crack the intensity of his regard. “Something real.”

That startled him out of his stillness. He deliberated for a moment, before raising one hand into her view and pulling off its leather glove with the other. Ink-stains smudged his fingers.

She’d assumed he would say something cocky, something cliché, something she could scorn him for. “You write?” Noora hated that he’d surprised her.

A small smirk. “You know I write.”

“You did not stain your fingers like that leaving calling cards for me.”

He shrugged, running a hand through his hair. “Why should I tell you what I write, if you won’t tell me?”

Because ‘unfulfilled curiosity’ and ‘withheld knowledge’ swished like wine in Noora’s mouth—which might have sounded like a compliment, if one were unaware of Noora’s inability to handle even a glass of elder wine. “Is it love poetry?” she asked, a twinge of humor sneaking onto her tongue despite her best efforts at swallowing it. “Is that why you’re so popular?”

He shook his head and his smile down at the ground. “I don’t write love poetry.”

“Love songs then?”

His eyes rose back to hers.  _Definitely smiling._  “Would you like me to write you a love song, Miss Sætre?”

“No.” And then, because she couldn’t push the banter back down her throat: “I enjoy music too much.”

Laughter wrote itself onto the lines of William’s face, but didn’t leak from his mouth. “Would you like me to dedicate a travel journal to you?”

If they were still walking, surprise might have stolen her footing again. “A travel journal?”

“Yes.” Once she gave him her attention and her gaze, he refused to surrender either. “I spent the last year touring the Continent. That’s what I write about.”

She shouldn’t have asked. She shouldn’t have pushed. She really, really shouldn’t have, because Noora had several travel books on her shelves, all creased of spine, and would give anything to go to the places between their covers. “The whole Continent?”

“Let me tell you over a waltz some night.” A pause. “Your turn, Miss Sætre.”

And even though she shouldn’t give him the satisfaction or the advantage of a reply, of a single thought from her head… “I like drinking chocolate. More than tea or lemonade or champagne or any other drink.”

“Drinking chocolate,” he echoed.

“Especially once it’s gone cold.” The sleeves of her dress sighed against her shoulder blades when she shrugged. “Two facts about me.”

William remained motionless. He stood there, staring at her rather than out at the water, as the sun caught the gold in his dark locks and the smile flickering on his lips. His flickered grin.

For that breath of seamless, cloudless sunlight, Noora could not help but smile back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (William's travel writing was one hundred percent inspired by Colin Bridgerton from Julia Quinn's Bridgerton novels <3)


	4. Chapter 4

So perhaps a midday stroll with William Magnusson was not the heinous experience that Noora had imagined. She could live with that, as long as she never had to confess it to him or Eva or any other living being.

(Willhelm received his own chapter that night.)

* * *

Dancing with William Magnusson was not as dreadful as Noora had expected it to be either. This troubled her. The fact that a part of her had  _wished_  to share this waltz with him tonight—that troubled her even more.

But Noora could not deny that, when he’d appeared during her first free moment to murmur  _You owe me a dance_  too close to her earlobe, that her nod had come too easily. That she’d been waiting for him to find her. Anticipating the moment when she’d feel herself fill his gaze.

(Nor could she deny that her breath had hitched when her palms had settled on the ridge of his shoulders; when his palms had curled at her waist.)

“Did you know,” Noora said as they moved through the steps of the dance, “that I received an anonymous gift today?” She fought to keep her tone steady. Waltzes were hardly grounds for scandal anymore—even Almack’s allowed them—but nevertheless... The weight of William’s hands on her… The sheer proximity of his body and breath…

It all felt more intimate than it should have.

William’s face remained blank, his grip firm. “Did you?”

“A chocolate pot.”

Still blank of face, still firm of grip, still flawless of step. “Someone must know you well.”

Noora raised both eyebrows. “Someone must know one fact about me.”

"Two facts.”

“Here is a third: I cannot keep it.”

William’s sudden study of her seemed at odds with the ease at which he continued their dance. “Why not?”

The swaying music and couples kept Noora from crossing her arms or rolling her eyes, fixed them among enough people that she didn’t dare scoff. But it didn’t distract her from saying, “Because. It isn’t proper.” Because it put her in his debt.

“It could be proper,” he pointed out. “You don’t know the sender.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No. You don’t know him.” The music swelled, wove their final steps, and ended the dance. Brought her hands down from his coat, his from her dress. “But you could.”

(He spoke quietly, but his voice still followed Noora all the way to the other side of the room.)

* * *

“Why,” Eva’s hushed voice burst with barely contained laughter, “were you dancing with Mr. Magnusson?”

Noora had a glass of lemonade between her fingers and a sudden urge to flee to the nearest coach when Eva broke away from conversation with Mr. Vasquez to wrap a palm around her wrist and pull her towards the draperies.

She shrugged, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and said, “He asked.”

In her pomona green gown—white might have been the traditional color for single girls, but Eva worried too much about spills to wear it often—Eva looked equal parts stunning and skeptical. “I thought  _you’d never touch him, even for a country dance_.”

“That’s a horrible impression of me.” Even if she  _had_ spoken those very words just weeks before, when Eva had first noticed William’s fixation on her dance card.

Eva raised an eyebrow at her.

“It was one dance, Eva. I’m not marrying him.”

Both eyebrows now. “Noora Sætre willingly dancing with London’s most notorious rake. My world is shaken.”

“Isn’t that your suitor?”

Her eyebrows didn’t fall. “Christoffer Schistad?” Eva snorted. “Please. He’s Christoffer Schistad.”

In the distance, Christoffer Schistad appeared to be living up to his best friend’s word, flirting with a girl who bore no resemblance whatsoever to Eva.

Eva’s eyes followed hers. “He’s everyone’s suitor,” she quipped, a beat too late, a beat too distracted. With a second’s lapse between first sight and speech.

Noora nodded. Her stomach sank. She knew how Eva wore hurt—the lines on her forehead that she tried to hide, the confusion she tried to blink from her eyes before anyone saw.

Mr. Schistad laughed at something his latest dance partner had murmured.

Eva blinked again, and then turned away.

 _Better now than later_ , Noora reminded herself when guilt began to spread through her chest. Better her pride wounded in the present than her engagement broken in the future.

“A true buck.” The grin Eva flashed Noora came a beat too late too.

(Guilt itched worse than bug bites.)

Hooking an arm through Noora’s, Eva led her back over to the refreshments and a platter of dwindling desserts. “You might not be marrying him, but he is marrying someone.”

Noora blinked. “Mr. Schistad?” she asked slowly, carefully, though she already knew better.

“No,” Eva said with an emphatic shake of her head. “Mr. Magnusson. Apparently, he came back to London, because his father expects him to find a wife by the end of the Season. Chris—Mr. Schistad told me.”

Noora blinked again. And again. Her chin swiveled in spite of her better judgment, her eyes searching and scanning and—

She froze at the sight of William standing off to the side of the room with a vaguely familiar girl. Blonde and pretty and laughing. Noora tore her eyes away when she saw a smile touch his lips.  _Really_ pretty.

“Whatever will the ton do with their favorite bachelor married?” she said, striving for a tone of light mockery and succeeding only at thin venom.

“Whatever will you do?” Eva teased.

When Noora smiled next, it strained her face. “Oh, goodness knows.”

(She really needed to send the chocolate pot back.)

* * *

Noora weighed the likelihood that William Magnusson might have a third eye hidden somewhere on his head. Or perhaps a gifted psychic in his employ. How else could he find her so easily every time Eva stepped away for even a moment?

(At this particular moment, another man, whose name Noora could not recall, had been bragging to her about the size of his country estate.) (He made his excuses as soon as he saw William walking over to them.)

“Miss Noora Amalie Sætre,” he greeted.

“Must you say my full name every time you see me?”

He felt too close to her, even though Noora knew he’d stopped at a proper distance. “I don’t have to do anything. It’s a pretty name.” A proper distance—but still near. Still standing as close to her as manners allowed.

For one inhale, Noora hoped his blonde friend from earlier would see them. By the time she exhaled, she'd already bitten down hard on her own tongue.  _So dumb_. She wished she had a loose lock of hair she could tuck behind her ears, any reason to avert her eyes. “Did you want something?”

"Dance with me again.”

Noora tilted her head at him.

He felt closer still, though he hadn’t moved a step. “Don’t you want to know where I’ve traveled?”

 _Yes_. But there were other factors to consider—the envious glances from other girls and their mothers, the speculative ones from other gentlemen and their wives. Dancing with her twice, each dance so close together… “Mr. Magnusson…” She shook her head. “People will think you’re interested in me.”

The wryness in William’s answering stare said  _yes, clearly_ as loudly as his tongue could have.

Noora shook her head again. “You know what I mean.”

"No, I don’t.” His hair fell into his eyes when he looked at her now; she wanted to right it for him. Cut it for him. Touch it for him. “You don’t care what any of them think, not really. Not about one dance.”

"Two dances.”

William rolled his eyes and offered her his arm.

Noora rolled hers too, but nevertheless rested her gloved hand upon his sleeve. 

* * *

William Magnusson had, apparently, traveled across the majority of the Continent this year, and had plans to see the remainder during the next.

“Have you visited?” he asked her, as Noora spun around with all the other female dancers. William and the rest of the men followed with synchronized steps of their own.

"No.”

His eyes found hers, even as the steps of the dance carried her away from him again. “But you want to.”

Noora pretended not to hear. Her mind wandered back to his descriptions of Paris, of Italy, of Greece. To the smile that had claimed his vivid brown eyes when he’d recalled them.

It didn’t matter what she wanted.

* * *

“You’re quiet,” William commented when the music stopped and the couples around them scattered. “No insults for me?”

Noora’s voice felt as stiff as her shoulders when she answered, “We’re even now. I don’t have to dance with you again.”

He took a step towards her, to avoid the skirt of the lady laughing behind him. The levity dimmed from his eyes. “No. You don’t.”

Noora swallowed.

“But that isn’t why you danced with me.”

“Why else?” She meant it as a challenge, but her voice gave away the dryness in her throat, the strange, inexplicable sadness that had knotted its way through her stomach.

“You don’t like me at all? Not even a little bit?”

Noora smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle from her dress. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, and burst, “Aren’t you looking for a wife? Isn’t that why you came back to London?”

She didn’t know that she’d ever seen him startled speechless before—not since calling him a cliché.

“ _Maybe_ ”—she continued, raising her chin—“you should dance with one of the girls you might marry.” Because even if she did want to marry (which she didn’t), and even if she did want to marry William Magnusson (which she’d never), men like him didn’t marry title-less, fortuneless girls. Not outside of fairytales and fiction.

Another beat of silence fell between them, screeching louder between her ears than any noise from any ball. William smiled through it. “Are you jealous?”

When Noora made to walk away, he caught her wrist.

“Don’t leave,” he said. His fingertips haunted her skin, even through their gloves, before dropping back to his side.

Noora told herself that she didn’t wish to know what his bare fingertips would feel like against her bare skin. “I'm not jealous.” She  _didn’t_.

His eyes gleamed words she couldn’t find letters for—that he, maybe, couldn’t find the sounds for either. His gaze consumed her like the physical, tangible touch that she’d just imagined on her bare skin, real and solid and so warm.

She said nothing.

William shook his head. He lingered there for a moment longer, before turning and veering away.

She did nothing.

* * *

Noora did not  _decide_  to follow Mr. Magnusson into the garden. One moment, she was standing there, frozen among all the other young ladies, and the next—

She felt herself striding after him, stepping out into the fresh, moonlit air before she could register the trajectory of her own feet. Then she saw the back of William’s head, and realized why her pace had quickened.

“I don’t care who you marry,” she said once she’d fallen into step with him, glad for the garden’s privacy.

(She shouldn’t have been.)

(They didn’t have a chaperone. She didn’t have a plan. None of this was reasonable.)

He blinked down at her, flattening his expression before it could give away any reaction to her presence. “No,” he replied, his tone equally inflectionless. “You don’t care about marriage at all.”

Noora gulped. So close. They were strolling so close to each other. “Exactly.” So close and so secluded. The farther they walked down the winding garden path, the more convinced Noora became that they were truly, utterly alone.

“Right.” He stopped to face her, boring his eyes down into hers, the heat and weight of his regard an open flame. She could burn from it. From him. “Was that all?”

_No._

Casting aside reason and wisdom and all common sense, Noora raised her hands to his cheeks, her lips to his, and threw herself into the pyre.

At first there was only that: her mouth warm upon William’s, his moving against hers automatically. Shock slowing his lips.

Then the pyre caught.

His hands molded to her waist, grasping and clutching. His mouth slid against hers, soft at first then, and then more firm, more certain, more relentless. His hands found the shape of her hips through her flowing white gown. Spread there, until his palms seemed to swallow her. Tightened there, until her chest heaved against his.

She curled her fingers through his hair, dragging his face down to hers, herself up to him. Noora didn’t know what she would do when they broke apart, what he would do, how she would justify this to herself, so she drowned herself in the moment. There was only William’s mouth, William’s hands, and her own sprinting heartbeat. The next minute didn’t exist yet.

He stole breath after breath from her chest until she had no choice but gasp against his lips. His forehead fell against hers. Her heart kept pounding against his. Time returned.

“Was that all?” he repeated, his voice a rasped echo of itself. (Perhaps she’d stolen his breath too.)

The next minute came. Noora still didn’t know what to do with it, only that—

_Was that all?_

She shook her head, and let her hands slip down to his shoulders.

William’s grin swept across her cheek when he wrapped his arms around her, enfolding her into a swirling hug that she could not help but return.


	5. Chapter 5

Not a single member of the ton would ever suspect that Mr. William Magnusson had any attachment to any particular lady. He never claimed more than two dances from the same girl, never called upon any of the heiresses at whom one would expect him to set his cap, and had not stated his intentions to any father or patriarch.

Rather, he remained as inscrutable as ever and all the more desired for it.

Of course—not a single member of the ton realized that he and Miss Noora Sætre had taken to sneaking away into isolated garden nooks and forgotten rooms at every possible opportunity.

At the moment, Noora had her arms curled at the nape of his neck, his hands scrolling her waist, and his lips exploring her neck. A wall of books mumbled against her back as William continued wrinkling her white muslin. “We have to leave,” he murmured into her pulse, drawling his lips up and up her throat until they reached her smile once more.

Noora ran her palms along his shoulder blades. He was right, of course. She’d been thinking the same for several minutes now. “Leave then,” she whispered into his mouth, catching his lower lip between her teeth. (So much more fun than any ball.) (So much more reckless.)

William seized another quick kiss from her swollen lips, before unwrapping her arms from around his neck, and stepping away to point one finger at her. “Don’t touch me.”

Noora raised them in mock surrender, already missing his solid warmth in spite of herself. “Are you afraid I’ll ruin you?” she teased.

"Deathly.”

"Mhm.”

Strange to be joking about ruin, when she stood so perilously close to it. If anyone ever heard them, saw them…

But Noora didn’t want to catch a husband, had never intended to stay in London forever, and took an equal to greater risk every time she picked up her quill.

“Noora.” William’s voice broke through her thoughts; she hadn’t realized just how far away from the moment they had carried her, until she heard her name on his tongue, felt his fingertips on her cheek. “You know you don’t need to fear ruin any more than I do.”

Protests avalanched to the tip of her tongue—of course she did, he couldn’t possibly realize how much she did—only to melt when she caught the meaning softening his dark eyes. Her breath disappeared on its way from her chest to her mouth.

_It wasn’t ruin if the man married the girl in question._

Noora coughed. “What were you reading when I came in?” she asked, easing away from him, sliding her spine along the books.

He lifted his eyes to the ceiling, but still seemed to see straight through her. When he looked back down, he reached over to the closest table to hand her the book that had occupied him until she could follow him out of the ball and into the library.

Her breath caught again. “ _Cecilia_?” she asked, once she could trust her voice not to crack.

“You’ve read it,” he guessed.

Noora nodded, hoped that she hadn’t hesitated too long. “Hasn’t everyone?” She watched his fingers as he flipped through the pages she had written, the thoughts she had reworked and reworded time and time again. She’d seen countless people hold her book before, but had never itched with the intimacy of it. Not like this. She felt like he still had his hands on her; like he was still stroking his thumb along the thin skin and blue veins beneath her wrist.

“You’ve read it,” he repeated, smirking down into pages. “It’s progressive like you are. A  _social critique_.” How strange to hear him attach the words she’d spoken about Jane Austen to her book.

“Did you like it?” How strange to utter a question that meant everything to her as though it weighed no more than a feather.

“Doesn’t everyone?” Still smirking, he copied her evasion.

She rolled her eyes. “No. Most people read it to pick it apart.”

“I liked it.” He offered no more, no less, and Noora knew better than to push.  _Pushing_ would give him one of the puzzle pieces he needed to work out her secret, and Noora had observed his perceptiveness too many times over now to grant him that advantage.

At least he wasn’t alluding to marriage anymore.

* * *

Things continued that way for a fortnight longer. Noora and William spent as much time together as they could, always in secret. Noora spent as much time writing as she could, always at night. The rest, she spent with Eva—who seemed more and more distracted, the nearer her wedding day loomed.

“Eva,” Noora said one day from her bed, as her friend picked through her dresses with listless fingers. “You know you don’t have to marry yet. Not if you don’t want to.”

Eva paused, her long hair tumbling over her back as she turned from her wardrobe. “I want to,” she protested. “I’m just sick of all the decisions and the fuss and the  _planning_. We’d both be happier with an anvil wedding at Gretna Green. Quick and finished.”

"I’m surprised Mr. Vasquez hasn’t suggested it.” Noora had heard him, more than once, detail his impatience with wedding ceremonies, his annoyance with the ritual of it all.

Eva’s shoulders slumped. “He has. And then he remembers how excited his sister is to see her older brother’s wedding.”

“Ah.”

“Vilde needs to come back from Scotland. She thrives on all this.”

Noora nodded, and waited for Eva’s posture to straighten, her usual good cheer to return.

She waited a while longer.

* * *

For all the times she and William had managed to sneak away now, Noora had never gotten any indication of anyone noticing. Not once.

Of course—she did not have a fiancée. “Have you seen Eva?” Mr. Vasquez asked her one evening, wearing his impatience with their surroundings like a poorly tied cravat.

Her brow lowered. She hadn’t. She’d been too focused on counting down the minutes until she could safely follow William out to the garden’s hedge maze. ( _So_ many places to get lost.) “No.” She scanned the room now for a telltale glint of reddish hair.

Nothing.

Dread unspooled through Noora’s stomach, jabbing her teeth into her lower lip and her eyes into another dart around the room.

Because she couldn’t find Mr. Schistad either.

* * *

William reached out to thread his fingers through hers as soon as she found him in one of the garden maze’s dead ends, ten or so minutes later than they’d agreed. “You’re here,” he said, smiled.

She kept her arms planted at her sides.

The corners of his lips faltered. “And you’re annoyed.”

“I thought you told Mr. Schistad to stay away from Eva.”

William let his head and hair fall back slightly, rolling his eyes up at the crescent moon. “I advised him to be careful with Miss Mohn.”

“Be careful?” Noora repeated. “That wasn’t our deal.”

“That was exactly our deal. I told you he wasn’t my servant.”

Noora counted back from ten in her head; she lost patience at six. “Well, he wasn’t careful. Neither of them are in the ballroom, Mr. Vasquez is looking for her, and…”

William raised an eyebrow. “Does he suspect?”

“ _Yes_.” Maybe. “No.”

“Then there’s no problem.”

“No problem?”

Kicking himself away from the dark green hedge he’d been leaning against, William settled his palms upon her sleeves. “Noora,” he began carefully, “has it occurred to you that Miss Mohn might know what she’s doing?”

_"No_.” Stubbornness shook her head. “Eva doesn’t know what ruin is like. She doesn’t know how it feels to have your parents stare at you like you’ve lost all your worth. To have an entire village ostracize you. To lose everything, because of one poor decision, one lying, selfish, manipulative rogue. If she knew—” If she knew, then Noora would never have had to demand William’s assistance in the first place.

She did not realize that she’d started shaking until William pulsed his grip around her shoulders; until he began kneading fingertip-sized circles along the tense lines of her upper back. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “No one is going to be ruined. I promise.”

He traced her face with his eyes, even after she'd turned away from him—especially after she'd turned away from him—to cast her own at the ground.

“It’s okay,” he said again, his mouth landing right by her ear when he wrapped his arms around her.

Noora collapsed against him. She shook her head into his chest, burying her face there, until she couldn’t see anything but his coat, couldn’t smell anything but his musk, couldn’t hear anything but his steady heartbeat and mumbled reassurances.

_It’s okay_.

For that moment, she believed him.

The next moment—

A sharp gasp sounded behind them. “Good heavens!”

The next moment, the world came flooding back, already falling apart. 

* * *

It wasn’t one person that discovered them, but four. A group of evening strollers. Noora knew their faces but not their names, and didn’t have a chance to remember a single one before William was glaring at them over her head and hurrying her away.

A gentlemen and two girls—sisters?—and one mother.

Laughter built in Noora’s chest, scaled her throat, and creaked through her mouth. It continued building, scaling, creaking until William stopped several turns deeper in the garden’s maze and helped her down to a bench.

She didn’t require much help. Her legs felt limp.

“Noora.” He brushed her cheek with his thumb.

She flinched. “Ironic, isn’t it? All my worry about Eva being compromised,” she said, laughed again. Perhaps  _laugh_ was not the right word—laughter didn’t usually taste like ash.

Tension weighed at his brow, his mouth, his gaze. Hysteria kept scrawling over hers.

“The entire ballroom will know by the time we return,” she stated, her voice still a pitch off to her own ears. It didn’t matter that it had been perhaps the most innocent embrace they’d shared in all their weeks together—only that she had been caught engulfed in William’s arms, clinging to him for dear life as he pressed kisses into her hair. Only that it had looked intimate and would sound ruinous by the time the scandal sheets had their say.

William tried to take her hand; she didn’t pull away this time, but didn’t twine her fingers through his either. A nod, barely perceptible, prodded his chin.

She wanted to collapse again, to bury her face in his shoulder and forget, but that was how she had gotten here in the first place.

“Noora,” he repeated. She had to look up at him, so slumped were her shoulders. “You have to marry me.”

_Now_ she tugged her palm back. “I don’t have to do anything.” The stars overhead seemed to mock her, so pretty and out of place with her spiraling, outraged despair. The gleaming moon too.

William ran his freed hand over his face. “Please marry me,” he tried again. “How else can I protect you?”

“Protect me?” she echoed. “I don’t need you to  _protect me_.” But even as the protest filled her mouth, she heard the falsehood in it. He couldn’t do anything to save her from the whispers and the judgment and the scorn if she didn’t marry him. Noora realized that.

“So you’ll just leave London,” he said. “Where will you go?”

Noora peered up at the snickering stars. “The Continent.”

“Alone?”

She shrugged.

“You’d rather move to another country, alone, than marry me?”

The hurt in his eyes sparked a fresh glint of indignation in hers. “Than marry anyone!”

William clenched his jaw. “Because of a bride’s vows? Do you think I’d expect obedience from you? That I’d steal your money or property or anything of yours?”

“It’s  _ownership_.”

A hard, strained breath. “People marry all the time—your friends will, and you’re not concerned about anyone owning them.”

“Yes, but…” Noora exhaled, swallowed, and tried again. “You don’t want to marry me.”

William’s palms swallowed her cheeks, tilting her gaze back to his. “Yes, I do.” His regard burned like a match, just as smoldering and just as consuming. He waited for her to answer, to say anything, to do anything.

But she couldn’t.

He kept his hands on her face. “Bloody hell, Noora, I love you.”

Noora regained control of her muscles. She winced away from his palms, away from him altogether. A laugh or a sob climbed up her throat.  _I love you too_ , she wanted to say, but there were too many other words covering it. Burying it. Words like: “You don’t know me. Not really.”

William mumbled another curse under his breath.

“You don’t,” she insisted. “If you knew everything, you wouldn’t want to marry me.”

“Have you murdered someone?”

Her next sobbed laugh almost choked her. “Of course I haven’t murdered someone.”

“Then I’ll still want to marry you.” Any amusement dried from his voice. “I promise.”

And as pretty as those words sounded, as much as she wanted to clutch at them—

“I’ve been engaged before." Steeling a breath and herself, Noora went about the task of proving him wrong. "I was young, too young, and desperate to get away from my parents. I would have done anything he asked.” The words tumbled out like daggers, slicing her throat and mouth and memories on their way. “So I did. He left the next morning.”

William’s regard felt as intense and inscrutable as ever.

“Do you see?” Noora pleaded or challenged.

He brushed one finger along her chin, slanting it back up. “That your fiancée was a bastard? Yes.” A shake of his head. “Marry me.”

Noora shook her head too. In disbelief that he cared so little about a history that would make other men spit on her; that he blamed her former fiancée without a thought, when her own parents had only ever faulted her. In frustration, because she wanted him, and she couldn’t have him, and he  _didn’t understand_. “But it’s not only that. I…” She trailed off. He raised an eyebrow. “I have another secret.”

William opened his mouth.

Noora beat him to speech. “You’ve read  _Cecilia_.” Breath stalled in her chest as she waited for William to react, to respond. “That’s what I’ve written. I’m the author.”

In the distance, the ball kept spinning with music and chatter.

In the moment—William’s lips curved. “I knew it.”

Hers fell apart. “You knew it?”

“I suspected,” he amended. “Norman Ames? Progressive politics? Your secret writing?”

_Too damn perceptive_. “And…” she broke off. She hadn’t been expecting his nonchalance; she didn’t know how to answer it. “And you still don’t see the problem with us marrying?”

His smile remained. “No.”

“William…” Why was he making her say this? He was far too intelligent not to realize it already. “Someday, someone will discover my identity. I’ll have to leave London.”

"I would take care of it.”

“It will be a scandal!”

“Yes.” William didn’t blink. “Marry me.”

Noora swam, floundered, and drowned in his unwavering stare.

_She loved him_.

“No.”

It didn’t matter.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so, so, so much to everyone who’s followed this story! It’s been insanely fun to write, and it means SO much to know that other people have enjoyed it too. Noorhelm and historical romance novels are two of my very favorite things, trying to combine the two with this fic was seriously like my Dream Project -- every comment and kudo on this story made me over the moon happy, I love this fandom more than words <3 <3 <3

“I’m never forgiving my parents for this,” Eva declared.

Noora only had a few things left to pack; she’d started upon returning to the Mohns’ townhouse last night, before Mr. and Mrs. Mohn had even hinted that she’d need to leave as soon as possible, and had risen early to finish. “Eva…” She’d expected the dismissal. Keeping a scandal in their home, as their daughter’s principle companion, would do their reputation no favors.

“I haven’t forgiven you either.” Sitting beside Noora on the floor, Eva shook her head at the ground, loose hair spilling about her cheeks. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about Mr. Magnusson!”

“As you tell me everything?”

She flushed, her cheeks doing their best to match the red highlighting her waves. Then she cast a contemplative glance at Noora’s luggage, like she was considering unpacking it article by article. “Not everything,” she admitted. “But only because I don’t want you to worry.”

Noora raised both eyebrows at her.

“Oh, fine,” Eva ceded. “We both need to work on communication. Which would be easier if you weren’t leaving London.”

She couldn’t argue that, so she shrugged instead. _Everything_ would be easier if she weren’t leaving London, leaving her publisher, leaving Eva. Noora swallowed. Everything would be easier if she could return to the beginning of yesterday night, when she was still sharing secret smiles with William from opposite sides of the ballroom.

“You’re really taking a ship to the Continent? Alone?”

“I have money saved.”

“I wasn’t concerned about the money.”

Silence stretched between them, filled only by the traffic beyond the window, the murmur of Noora’s folding.

“Noora...” Eva started, then hesitated. “Are you sure you don’t want to marry Mr. Magnusson?”

“I can’t.” She shook her head. “We don’t fit.”

Another hesitation. “I—” And another. “I don’t think I can marry Jonas.”

A new silence took shape. It felt more fragile. “Really?” Noora asked, handling the word like glass.

“I’ve known him for such a long time.” She exhaled a slow breath “And it’s always been such a given that we would marry eventually.  _Eventually_ always seemed so far off, but now it’s here, and—we still don’t fit.” She exhaled again, as though she could breathe out months of stress at once. “I know he’s your publishing contact, and that he knows your secret…”

Noora shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.” Not really. She was already leaving town, already had her newest draft finished and out of her hands. She could correspond with her publisher directly. And if Jonas were truly spiteful enough to release her name out of anger at Eva… “Have you told him yet?” Well, then she would hear from abroad.

Eva shook her head. “This afternoon.”

 _Ah_.

Still navigating the glasswork and shards the seemed to surround their conversation, Noora finally dared to ask, “Because of Mr. Schistad?”

“Partly.” Eva chewed on her lower lip. “I like him.”

And Noora could say that she didn’t trust him, that she didn’t believe he had any genuine intentions of marriage. But Eva sounded serious, and she was in no position to caution anyone about social ruin just now. “I had that figured out.”

“And you like Mr. Magnusson.”

Noora looked down into her nearly full luggage.  _She had that figured out too._

* * *

She had her private cabin sorted on the steamer, her luggage set down by her cot, a regular stream of letters promised by Eva, and her head in her hands when a knock sounded on the door. “Ma’am,” a heavily accented voice called. “We have your husband on board asking to see you.”

Her head and heart leapt up in tandem. “My husband?” Her legs ached to move but couldn’t break through the sudden ice that had settled over her kneecaps.

“I told him you only booked a cabin for one, but he reckons you’ll make do.”

Noora chipped at the ice in her knees, muscle by muscle. Perhaps they had the wrong room, the wrong woman. Perhaps a lunatic was waiting on the other side of the door. Perhaps—

All at once, she was on her feet, stumbling towards the door, wrenching her grip around the knob.

William stared down at her from beyond the threshold, his hair mussed by the ocean breeze, his eyes rimmed with dark circles.

Noora stared back. He was  _here_.

The thought must have slipped out of her mouth, because William answered, “Miss Mohn told me where to find you,” before stepping into her cabin and closing the door behind them.

“ _Eva_  told you?” When, how, _why_? (She already knew why.)

“This morning. I came to call on you.”

Noora didn’t cross her arms, but wrapped them around herself instead. All the better to hold her resolve, herself, together.

“You were just going to leave?” William said. He tacked an inflection on at the last word, but it still sounded like more of an accusation than a question.

“I can’t stay with the Mohns anymore.”

“And you can’t marry me.”

She could barely breathe; it had nothing to do with her stays or the cabin air. “No.” Everything to do with the intensity of William’s crackling, brown-eyed gaze.

“That’s slum,” he said, still not blinking. “If you don’t want to marry me, have the guts to say it. Don’t hide behind  _can’t_.”

“But”—they’d already gone through all of this, she’d already spent a night tossing and turning over it, she couldn’t do it again—“it’s true.”

William’s jaw shifted. “What’s true is that I can’t let you go.”

“I don’t need you to let me do anything,” she protested, more out of ritual than feeling, because  _of course_  she needed him to let her go. She couldn’t stand to otherwise. Just the motions of stepping onto the boat and closing herself into her cabin had struck a wound straight through her soles.

“That’s true too,” he acknowledged. “Which is why I booked a ticket on this steamer.”

Noora’s mouth opened. Nothing, not even breath, came out.

“You think that my reputation, your past, your book’s notoriety, matter to me. They don’t. And I’ll move to bloody France or Italy or India with you if that’s what it takes to prove it.”

Her lips fell another fraction apart. William brushed their lower curve with his thumb before catching her cheek in his palm.

“We have to be together,” he murmured. “Say that we should be together.”

Noora’s head had gone messy and muddled the moment he had appeared. Every inch of it, from her scalp to her tongue to the flushed skin that William kept cradling. “You’d travel to the Continent without a piece of luggage?”

“I don’t need luggage as much as I need you—to challenge me, to laugh at me, to do whatever the hell you want to me, as long as you’re here. And you need me. People need people.” William’s focus didn’t waver. “Say you’ll marry me, Noora.”

She turned her head, just far enough that her lips could close against the side of his palm. Almost a kiss. _People need people._ She’d tried so hard to convince herself otherwise—that she didn’t need anyone beyond her few friends, that no man was worth the risk of betrayal and scorn and heartbreak. And yet…

First, she nodded. Then she lifted her hands, guided his face down to hers, and kissed him outright.

(William’s grin tasted better than drinking chocolate.) 

* * *

They hurried off of the ship, minutes before it set sail from the harbor, two tickets wasted. Two grins; two beams; two hands twined. 

* * *

One long, rickety carriage ride later, they arrived in Gretna Green, found the blacksmith’s shop, and paid an obscene amount of money for an immediate anvil wedding.

_“Forasmuch as this man and woman have consented to go together by giving and receiving a ring, I, therefore, declare them to be men and wife before God . . .”_

A golden ring glinted on Noora’s third finger.

The hammer rang down on the anvil.

William’s growing smile swept across hers, propriety be damned. 

* * *

If their inn bedroom was small by Noora’s standards, it had to be minuscule by William’s. It boasted a bed just large enough for two, a smudged window overlooking the cloudy village square, and scarce space for anything else.

“We’ll stay somewhere nicer on our honeymoon,” William informed her. He came up behind her to wrap his smooth hands around her hips as they surveyed the cheery yellow bedspread, before nipping her warm, racing pulse.

“Honeymoon?” Noora arced back into her husband’s—her _husband’s_ —touch and chest.

“Mhm.” He kept kissing his way down her throat, mapping its thin, pale skin with his mouth. “France.” He grazed her neck with his teeth. “Italy.” She covered his knuckles with her palms. “Anywhere. Your choice.”

 _Her choice_. Marriage had long seemed like just the opposite to Noora—a lock and key that would forever steal her independence and agency. How strange that she couldn’t glance down at the ring adorning her finger without smiling; that hurrying from that steamer with William had felt like a prisoner’s escape from the gallows.

Later, she _might_ admit to him she felt freer now than she had in years. In the meantime, she turned around to return his kiss.

Noora gave her fingers over to his dark hair as William spread his grip along the small of her back, tugging her even and ever closer. She plundered his mouth with her own, demanding everything that she had almost denied herself: the softness of his lips, the hard need in his kiss, the intimacy of his smile. Giving it all back again and again and again.

Her chest and breath and heart strained against her corset. She hadn’t laced it terribly tight, but her dress had still turned stifling somewhere between the blacksmith’s shop and their bedroom; altogether too small and much too hot as William ran his fingertips along its cornflower blue silk. Never tearing his lips from hers, never allowing his tongue to stray from the desperate rhythm it had struck against hers, he moved his fingers up her spine, loosening her stays lace by lace until the silk sagged against her bodice. One step away from William, and it would slip from her chest completely.

“Tell me you want this,” he murmured into her mouth, his rasped voice proof of all the breath she’d stolen from him.

Noora nodded her chin against his, brushed her lips against his, and then inched away. Within seconds, her dress had sunk into a puddle at her ankles. Clad in only her white chemise, she stared up at William. He stared back. Then Noora was stumbling the buttons of his shirt undone and hurrying its sleeves past his shoulders, until it had joined her dress on the dim floorboards. She’d felt the firm plain of his chest a dozen times over now, but had never seen its bare, pale span before. The hard lines and muscles that hid beneath his clothing. Noora shook away the ridiculous impulse to kiss her way from his collarbone to his stomach; they had world enough and time.

For now, she lifted her eyes to meet William’s once more. Gaze heated with something close to reverence, he scanned her—her parted lips, her heaving chest, the silhouette that he could doubtless make out from beneath her undergarments.

She thought he might help her out of her chemise now, but his hands went to her bun instead. William pulled pin after pin from her hair until her blonde locks gave way to gravity, falling to her shoulders in soft, scrambled waves. The corners of his lips rose into an even broader smile as he combed his fingers through her freed hair. “I’ve never seen it down before.” His breath felt like candlelight on her skin; one touch away from burning straight through her.

Noora didn’t have to ask whether or not he liked her loose hair—she could feel his appreciation in the next stroke of his lips. Losing his grip in her hair, William kissed her as though he’d like to inhale her.

Clutching the nape of his neck, Noora breathed him in right back.

* * *

They spent the next four days in their musty inn bedroom, ignoring the cramped walls and creaking floorboards; ignoring everything but each other.

“We’ll just lie here for one more day,” Noora said each morning, her blonde hair spread about her pillow and her legs tangled with her husband’s.

And each morning, William replied, “As you wish, Mrs. Magnusson.” He murmured the words into her mouth the first day, her stomach the second, her neck the third, and her inner thigh the fourth. Always smiling, no matter how hard the rain poured beyond their window.

* * *

(Needless to say, William Magnusson’s elopement caused quite a stir across London's drawing rooms and scandal sheets—not to be rivaled until the sudden, altogether unexpected betrothal of Mr. Christoffer Schistad and Miss Eva Mohn.)


End file.
